Maybe I'm looking at a virus, which is why it's so weird to me.

There's a machine here that, starting last night, wouldn't output anything to the screen. It looked like the monitor just wasn't getting a signal, as the power LED on the LCD monitor was orange. However, it was possible to remotely connect to this machine, though it looked...funny. The video card drivers were reinstalled and a few diagnostics were run.

Now, when we start up, everything in the POST and boot process as a whole is just plain weird. It's like a normal boot, but every single character has been replaced by another seemingly random character. This includes alphanumeric characters and punctuation, but also special characters like ace cards, smiley faces, and hearts. It's like the ASCII set has reeeeally gotten screwed up. Even the progress bar for loading Windows (before the logo screen), has replaced bars.

Then when we get in, remote only, everything is really slow. REALLY slow.

Any ideas what that initial weirdness is about?

ps-I promise this will be my last request for a while

Unless you have a virus that wrote to the BIOS, it's probably not virus activity.

I'm guessing you have a hosed video card. Specifically, the card's RAM or address lines.

Yeah, what he said. It's a fried video card. The screwy characters are caused by broken-bit errors in the video RAM.

As everybody else says, it's the video card. It might not be fried however as it is possible that it's just not seated properly so take the card out, blow any dust away and put it back in. I saw it the other day on a relatives PC I was fixing. It was a POS Dell which used their plastic clip retention mechanism instead of screws for the cards which doesn't actually work that well...

Also if it has a fan on it make sure that it's spinning and not full of dust, It could be overheating.